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supposed to read the Book of Ester
... and don't forget the plays (purimshpil): the origin of Yiddish theater and film ...
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Looking at that word, you could surely never guess which two languages came together in Yiddish. 
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Maybe best to keep the Yiddish words together in one thread.
Today's word 'meshuga or meshugga '. It survives in Dutch as 'mesjokke '. (no, not my socks) I can still here my mother say it on occasions when she was really shocked about unheard of things.
(the world only changing for the worse, she feared)
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Looking at that word, you could surely never guess which two languages came together in Yiddish. Two?! Only two?! I'll leave it to the professionals to tell us how Russian and Polish rank with Hebrew as relative contributors to Yiddish.
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Looking at that word, you could surely never guess which two languages came together in Yiddish. Two?! Only two?! I'll leave it to the professionals to tell us how Russian and Polish rank with Hebrew as relative contributors to Yiddish. OK, so I'm getting more good at writing phrases badly. I know a bit of german, and know that yiddish is closely connected with hebrew/jewish culture, so said two. I didnt know to say out loud that i did not mean they were the only two. Ive never heard of a living language that has only two sources, but from the little bit Ive learned, it seemed like german and hebrew were the two biggest bits of yiddish. I guess that makes me oh for three.
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You forgot to sign that ron obvious.
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Yiddish is mainly a Germanic language with a large vocabulary from Aramaic-Hebrew (loshn koydesh 'holy language'. There is also a sizeable input from various Slavic languages depending on dialect area (e.g., Poland, Galicia, or the Baltic states). There are also traces of Romance. In the Soviet Union, before they banned Yiddish outright, there was an official language policy of purging Yiddish of its Semitic, mainly religious, vocabulary. The original Yiddish speakers seem to have come from the Rhineland area of Germany, before moving on to the Pale in the East. The two major divisions of Yiddish, West (Benelux, France, Germany, mostly extinct by the late 19th century, modern Yiddish speakers in these countries are Eastern European speakers who migrated west after WW2) and East (Poland, Lithuanian, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine). The main bodies of speakers are divided between Israel and the USA/Canada. Argentina had a sizable Yiddish-speaking community, but that community has been dwindling.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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That's interesting, Nuncle. I would have thought Galician Jews were Sephardic and spoke Ladino. Now there's a dying language...
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I would have thought Galician Jews were Sephardic and spoke Ladino
There are at least two Galicias in Europe: (1) the Gallego-speaking area in NW Iberian peninsula; and (2) the old Austro-Hungarian administrative region in the Poland, Czech and Slovak area (aka Galicia-Volhynia), roughly between Lublin in the north, Krakow in the west, and Lwow in the east; and a possible connection with (3) the area in Anatolia, Galatia, that was possibly Celtic-speaking mentioned in a letter of Paul in the New Testament. There have been theories the the root gal- may be the same Celtic one in all three (plus let's thrown in Wallachia in Transylvania) and Gallia, etc.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Wow! Nuncle, is there anything you don't know? Any unknown unknowns? Fascinating stuff about the possible gal-/Celt link. Thanks. And yeah, I was thinking of the Spanish region.
(edited to add an un)
Last edited by AnnaStrophic; 03/27/08 06:40 PM.
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